by Con Chapman
Mary McCarthy
The remark was funny and provocative in the way that good talk show repartee should be, but it wasn't improvised; McCarthy (as she said at the time) had previously made the comment in an interview, and she had been prompted that Cavett would ask her the question before she went on the air. Just as Oscar Wilde rehearsed his apparently spontaneous epigrams like an actor playing before an opening night crowd, McCarthy knew what she wanted to say and she said it.
Lillian Hellman
What might have passed unnoticed in a literary magazine or at a cocktail party was broadcast to member stations of the Public Broadcasting System, however, including one playing on the television of the object of McCarthy's derision. Hellman was incensed and called Hersey, suggesting that they join forces and sue McCarthy. Hersey tried to persuade Hellman not to take legal action, but Hellman went ahead, suing McCarthy, Cavett and PBS for damages she claimed totalled $2.25 million. (Note to non-lawyers: There is no necessary relationship between damages claimed and injuries actually suffered.)
Thus began a legal battle over a flip remark intended to wound a long-time rival that turned the American popular literary scene—back when there was such a thing—into a Civil War battlefield.
Hellman at the age of seventy-five was the older of the two by seven years, the author of a number of plays that had met with varying degrees of success (one ran for 691 performances, another closed after just seven). She was a far leftist, which in those days meant a defender of Josef Stalin and a critic of Leon Trotsky. It is difficult at this late date, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, to understand the fierce antipathies that the various schisms of Marxism held towards each other then, but in present-day terms it would not be too far off the mark to say that the counterpart of a Trotskyite might advocate for the U.S. to get out of the middle east, while a Stalinist would have no problem with bombs from Iran bursting in air over Tel Aviv.
McCarthy, like Hellman, had achieved a popular yet highbrow literary success that is hard to imagine today. Her 1963 novel The Group follows the post-college careers of eight graduates of Vassar, then an all-women's school, as they navigated uncharted waters where birth control—and thus sex—were still uncertain propositions. For a coed of the mid-sixties it was the sexual equivalent of the Fannie Farmer cookbook as a basic introduction to what lay ahead.
McCarthy was the more attractive of the two by a long shot; not movie-star beautiful, perhaps, but the sort of face and features and demeanor that, when combined with a piercing intellect, reduces college boys to drone bees buzzing around a queen. Hellman, by contrast, can charitably be described as plain, and more accurately as homely. Hellman was the lover of detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammet, or more precisely one of many; Hellman was home base in a game of tag that Hammett, a compulsive womanizer, played with her over three decades.
Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
McCarthy, on the other hand, held the whip hand in her relationships; she dumped Philip Rahv (according to one wag's view) for Edmund Wilson because the latter's prose outshone the former's. (Editor: Dream on, writer, dream on.) One source suggests that McCarthy developed an enmity towards Hellman after Hellman slept with, or at least made a pass at Rahv.
By the time of the Cavett show, Hellman's reputation exceeded McCarthy's based on her three volumes of memoirs that began to appear in 1969 with the publication of An Unfinished Woman and ended in 1976 with Scoundrel Time. It was these works that McCarthy probably had uppermost in her mind when she made the crack about “and” and “the.”
McCarthy was said to have thought the news of the lawsuit against her was a joke when she first heard it, but she became deeply concerned once she understood the gravity of the situation; she had accumulated very little money as a result of her writing, while Hellman held the copyrights to Hammett's works, which are still in print and are likely to remain so for a long time. Hellman was loaded for bear, and McCarthy was low on ammo.
But as McCarthy began to research her defense against Hellman, it turned out she was right, more correct than she imagined. Just as Hammett was a compulsive womanizer, Hellman was a compulsive liar. Hellman, the proud witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee who defied her inquisitors with her own memorable line—”I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions”—lied as other people breathed. It was second nature to her, part of her personality as a dramatist; she made things up, borrowed and blended events to suit her narrative—she never let the facts get in the way of a good story in the manner prescribed by the old newspaper reporter's aphorism. In her own words, “Everyone's memory is tricky, and mine's a little trickier than most.”
Most famously, the incident involving a woman named “Julia“ recounted in Hellman's memoirs, a tale subsequently made into a movie featuring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, was disputed by the very woman on whose life it was based.
Jane Fonda in “Julia”
The case dragged on for years, ending only with Hellman's death in 1984 as her estate decided not to pursue it any further. McCarthy felt cheated out of a victory she knew would be hers had the case gone to trial.
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Very good. Lively, funny, and informative.*
Interesting, Con. Read a great bio. of McCarthy a few years ago. She was pretty scrappy. Edmund Wilson is one of my gods, but he was a shit. Then again, there are few writers out there with healthy egos--most are shits or crazies (I have been known to lean toward the crazy in my time). We must divorce the writer from the work. In Hellman's case, her work is pretty "ew" for the most part, but she had that familiar "look at me, look at ME" attitude which some writers are compelled to enact, desperate to lure in an adoring public and establish that all-important cult of personality that often attempts to hide tepid prose and poetry. (Don't you just love my vast storehouse of pithy adjectives?). Anyway, I enjoyed this.*
I'm an admirer of Wilson as well, but I have to say I can't imagine McCarthy making love to him.
Axel's Castle is one of the best books of lit. crit. I've ever read and his uncollected works, The Shores of Light is excellent. Patriotic Gore is also up there. The only book Wilson has written that I have not yet read is To The Finland Station. It's on my list.
Finland Station is worth a read for a sense of Wilson's intellectual justification of his Marxism. I used to own an early copy, not a first edition, but sold it in one of my periodic purges when the books start to take over the living space.
At last count, there were approx. 3000 books crowding our cave. Wilson's and Eliot's would be the last to go : )
I've set up security cameras to make sure the P.G. Wodehouse paperbacks aren't breeding when I'm gone for the day.
An interesting take on the old feud/suit. Very good piece. Nice stab at explaining the Trotsky/Stalin thing.
For all her strange ways, Hellman was an interesting woman.
I read all three volumes of her memoirs as they came out in paperback. I was impressed that she bagged Hammett.
Interesting and thoughtful and well written. I like that it's thorough but has a light touch. It also reminded me of the fight between Mailer and Vidal. I can't remember which show it was on. Later Vidal said it had happened because Mailer had become upset and as usual "words failed him."*
I think it was on Cavett, and Vidal called Mailer a "cryptofascist." I was thinking the other day--I still have no idea what that means.
I think Vidal actually called Mailer a crypto-Nazi. Vidal, for sure, called William F. Buckley a cryptofascist, which was a fashionable word used by intellectual liberals back then to deride anyone they didn't like, mostly for their politics. I think the term actually originated in the radical feminist movement. It suggested that those people so named were great admirers of the Nazis, right wing enthusiasts to a fanatical degree. The 'crypto' part of the word meant that they were secretive about this affection for Fascists, since fascism had been out of favor for decades.
It was also a way for liberals to label hawks on the Vietnam war as being somewhat similar to the Nazis in the 'war is good for the economy' tradition.
Vidal, however, couldn't call Mailer a right wing Bircher or a hawk, so the word probably meant that Norman was simply brutish in the way of a chauvinist, I think.
I haven't called anyone a cryptofascist for years.
Ah--I see.
Where I went to college (U of Chicago) nobody was crypto-anything. It was all out there for the seeing.
I didn't graduate, but left college to join Boilermaker's Local 358 and build ships to carry iron ore on the Great Lakes. So, most of what I know about cryptofascism, I picked up at union meetings with my brother socialists. We drank a lot of beer and plotted the downfall of American capitalism. After the meetings we'd all go home and read Naom Chomski to our impressionable young children before we tucked them in and kissed them good night.
Graphic Arts Local 300, Revere, Mass., 9 months on strike. I've spent more time on a picket line in my life than Jimmy Hoffa did.
We struck at the Lorain and Toledo Ohio shipyards for nearly 13 months in the 1980's. After the strike we gave the owner, the notorious George Steinbrenner, major concessions on trade flexibility, and on his promise to give us lots of work in the future, we built one more thousand foot long ore ship in record time for record profits and he moved his operation down to Tampa, Florida where no 'troublesome' unions could force him to pay a decent wage.
But, eventually, most shipbuilding was going overseas anyway and jobs died off all over the country.
I made a move into designing, engineering and building complex electrical and computerized control systems for heavy industrial applications. I was lucky. I could make the change. Many could not.
I really loved building huge ships out of steel. Hard to describe the lure of the work, but I truly loved it.
They tried to bring back the Quincy, Mass. shipyards, but failed. A Greek guy got a lot of state subsidies--I was tangentially involved--but he couldn't pull it off.
Life is hard and then you work for Wal-Mart.
Lillian Hellman is one of the handful of American, women, writers, playwrights, whose work I do not have to live without because it has been available, brought out, brought to our attention, kept from disappearing. I do not believe the minimizing of her talent that still sometimes circulates around her. Her book, Maybe, is indispensable on my shelf. A lot of people do not like Jane Fonda, either, and it is not because her face looks chiseled from a rock.
Specifically, the book Maybe defies categorization. As I read it the first time, I stopped reading in the middle and flipped it over many times: fiction? memoir? true? mesmeric parable? I kept reading, could not put it down. I bought the first edition copy of it for $2 in NY, a beautiful printing of a "little" book. I can think of few other books I have read that draw the line between fiction and non- so well and none better, so her tendencies off the page concern me less. I searched the House Un-American Activities Committee transcript in 2001 or so, when it was released, but could not find Hellman's statements in it.
I'm not sure whether she made the "cut my conscience" remark during her testimony or in an interview beforehand. She apparently didn't name names, but supposedly testified at length about her own activites. There's a great chapter about her in Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals." A new bio is getting reviewed and prompted one reader to write in with a personal recollection of seeing her in a restaurant, where she was somewhat offended that the maitre'd and waiter didn't know who she was. Subsequently the writer saw a televised interview with her in which she was asked whether fame had any negative aspects. "Well," she said, "I can't go into a restaurant without being recognized."
But aren't all writers liars? I certainly am.
mccarthy endeared herself to me through her sharing of memories of elizabeth bishop, her classmate at vassar--